


Found the Moon

by brightly_lit, Septembers_coda



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Apocalypse, Brotherly Love, Dimension Travel, Gen, Isolation, Lighthouses, Loneliness, Ocean, Sacrifice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-09
Updated: 2018-12-09
Packaged: 2019-09-15 05:13:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,296
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16927146
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brightly_lit/pseuds/brightly_lit, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Septembers_coda/pseuds/Septembers_coda
Summary: Sam lies upon the sand and remembers many things, but he does not remember how this world ended. He only knows that it did.He knows what he no longer has—a family, a purpose, a place to go. A home, though perhaps he has never had that. Now he has the lighthouse.





	Found the Moon

**Author's Note:**

  * For [brightly_lit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/brightly_lit/gifts).



> I (septembers_coda) wrote this fic because the lovely brightly_lit’s incredible Supernatural Reverse Bang art, included here, inspired me—even though I claimed a different piece and had a wonderful collaboration this year, this idea took hold and would not let go. I waited until RBB was officially over so there is no confusion; this fic is not part of the challenge, but I wrote it based on this art. My thanks to BL for letting me run with it after the fact, and for creating such loveliness in the first place.

 

Sam lies upon the sand and remembers many things, but he does not remember how this world ended. He only knows that it did.

He knows what he no longer has—a family, a purpose, a place to go. A home, though perhaps he has never had that. Now he has the lighthouse.

It is not a home. It is not safety or a guide to anything, except that Sam can always see it and return to it across the waving sea grass, and he does. He does, actually, find it beautiful.

He looks at where the lighthouse breaks the sky, a silence among the cries of gulls. He lies back in the beachgrass and looks at it through the gold-brown strands tickling his face, undulating light stroking his eyelids. He sinks in memory down through the sand, past the sounds of insects and tiny shelled creatures, busy crabs and their shushing claws, a dying, drying starfish set among infinitesimal crystals of life. Behind his eyelids as in front of them is the lighthouse.

It’s a monument, and Sam wonders to what. There must have once been ships to guide, and now there is only empty ocean where the lighthouse looks. The ocean comes up high, to the foot of the lighthouse, and takes things back with it, and sometimes leaves things, but only driftwood and seaweed and Sam. It would take him back, if he lay here past dusk. Sometimes he thinks he will, but he always climbs the spiral stair and lights the flame instead, so if there is anything the ocean does decide to bring, there is a light for it to find.

Thinking of a monument in sand, Sam remembers his father. 

_I’m home. All the time it was…_

He’s curled against his father’s side in a dark, cold motel room. Sam thinks it was the empty, gray months when this memory took place, December or January, but he does not know what year or how old he was. Old enough that Dad didn’t let him sit in his lap much anymore, but young enough that he didn’t seem to fear him as much as he would come to. The shadow of demon blood has not yet covered him. 

Dad wasn’t really drunk, but he’d had enough beer not to object when Sam got out of bed with Dean and into the other bed with him. He tucks Sam close and kisses the top of his head. Sam looks up at his face in the flickering light of the TV with the sound turned low. Dad’s eyes are slits, not really taking in the images, and then they’re closed. The sounds of the occasional car rushing by on a nearby highway blend with the sounds of the waves in the old movie on TV. Lady Liberty’s head sticks up out of the sand like the lighthouse. Young Sam recognizes the monument and what it represents. He’s horrified, afraid in a way he doesn’t understand, and he wants to go home. He starts to cry. Dad, in the grip of sleep, hugs him a little closer. “It’s just a movie, Sam.”

_You maniacs! You blew it up! God damn you all to hell!_

Sam has been damned to hell, though this place is not it. That’s one thing about the blazing sun, the unbroken blue—they make it hard to think of hell, and of all Sam remembers, he rarely remembers the cage. Though this is another cage.

He wonders why there were no hauntings of lighthouses he can remember, and why he and Dean so rarely hunted near the ocean. He thinks it’s because the ocean erases things: flesh from bones, memory from minds, time and the world. He has left time behind, and if this is not the world, he has left that behind, too.

He and Dean came here, or something like here on some other side, to prevent its end. Sam went alone to set the key, through danger and dark to start the ritual that would stop the sky from falling, though he thought Dean was close behind. He thought he had learned never to go alone. He went to the door of another world, one so close to this one that it brushed it, and the touch of two worlds together created the power needed to stop another apocalypse. He’s never been sure if he went through the door. He wonders if he was wrong that Dean was close behind—if he even knew about the lighthouse, the key that Sam found in one of his famous brainwaves that solved their problems so often. 

He wonders if this time, it caused the problem rather than solving it, and it was he—he and Dean—who were the maniacs, if they did blow it all up and this, this stretch of sand and grass, this tower of light that spills over endless ocean under endless sky, is all that’s left. 

He’s tried to find out. He spent weeks gathering driftwood and seaweed, carrying them out of the reach of the waves, trying to learn how to weave a seaweed rope strong enough to tie the driftwood together. He built a raft and went out with the tide, though he knew a death by thirst was likely all that waited for him on the sea. He went to meet it, almost hoping, and he thought of Dean.

He did not meet death. He met the lighthouse, and this same shore. He rowed across the waves all day with his improvised paddles, but when the ocean brought its gifts to lay at the lighthouse’s feet at dusk, he was again among them. 

That was the first night he lit the flame.

* * *

Sam does not want his life. He tries to remember when that began. Perhaps it began in a cold hotel room, realizing he had lost his father even as his father held him. Perhaps it began even before that, in flame, in blood dripping over his lips. He has fought for it, tried to change it, tried to love it for Dean’s sake if not his own. He had to return. He tried to escape so many times, but he always had to return. To hunting and his family’s legacy. To earth after hell. To his soul after he lost it. And always to Dean.

Sam remembers Dean. Dean would never let him lie in the waving beachgrass for hours letting memory take him, letting time, if there is time in this place, pass without use. Without trying—without _fighting._

“Rise and shine, princess,” he would say, when Sam wanted to let sacrifice steal him away, when hunger and pain were beautiful, were _for_ something. When he was saving the world, and he knew Dean would help him do it, until he stopped him. Until he said together, they would always fight.

_But there’s nothing to fight here, Dean._

He tried at first, but he could not fight the lighthouse, or the ocean, or the featureless shore. He fights hunger, and mostly wins. There’s seaweed, and fish when he can catch them, and crabs, and he cooks them over a rainbow-driftwood fire most days, when something becomes sharp inside him and reminds him of food.

Sometimes he realizes he’s trying to find enough food for Dean, too. He remembers the simple happiness in Dean over a slice of pie and a good burger, and hopes it would extend to a slice of seaweed and a good charred fish, if Dean were here to share it with him. He imagines him complaining and taking over the cooking. “Now _here’s_ how you make good seaweed. Leave it to the expert.”

Dean has always come before. Into the fire when Sam was a baby. When he was losing himself to demon blood, Dean was there, on the other side of Bobby’s safe room door. When some bigger kids—bigger than Dean, too—had him cornered behind the school and were pulling his hair and calling him names, Dean came and made them sorry, and made Sam laugh away his tears with his one liners.

Sam came for Dean, too. He’d pulled him from the grasp of demons and monsters uncounted, untied him, stitched him up, talked him away from the bottle and back to the world, and maybe Dean needed Sam to do that now, somewhere across the ocean. He ached terribly when he thought of it. The ache tore at him, drove him up the countless stairs to the lantern room with a flame. The pain was the only thing after all these months—surely years by now—that felt real.

Surely years. When Sam thought it, he wondered if it was actually decades. Maybe he was an old man by now. Maybe, if Dean ever did come, all he would find were a few flannel rags and Sam’s bones washed by sand.

No. Dean would come. He _must_ come. Where they went—when they died—they were supposed to be together. Sam would let the world burn, Dean would unleash terrible forces, they both would sacrifice all else to walk whatever world and meet whatever end _together._

So Sam could not accept an end here. He lit the beacon every night, and washed in its circling light, he slept.

Then one night came the storm, and the dream.

* * *

There was no weather on this shore. There was day that seemed long, and night that seemed slightly longer, like motel rooms after the fall equinox in the north. There was sun, relentless and unchanging, and sometimes wind off the water. At night it was cold, and when the lighthouse beacon bounced over waves, between its rays there were stars. There was no moon. Sam looked for it every night but it never came. There was never a cloud or a drop of rain, and Sam missed it, and he missed the moon and human voices.

The voices, though, returned the night of the storm. Sam found that once he slipped into sleep in the arms of the lighthouse, he never woke until morning. Sometimes he fought with loneliness and painful memory in his dreams, fought to wake, but he never could until the sun broke the lighthouse’s windows. Sometimes he never went to sleep for fear of the grip of dreams, and he watched the circling light on the ocean and waited for it to fade into dawn.

When the storm hit, he could feel its fury. He longed to run down into the crashing waves and feel the roar in his bones, watch the lightning tear at the towering waves, let them take him under or over or away forever. He ached to open his mouth under the outpouring of sky and feel the return of life under the freezing lash of rain, even if death followed straight after. Something, someone, was out in the storm.

He was trapped in dream and in the dream there were voices, beloved and familiar.

“He didn’t make it to the other side. Not all the way. He’s partly still here. I fear he is trapped between dimensions.”

Cas. He shouted as if over wind, and Dean— _Dean,_ his brother, always there, and now real again!—Dean shouted back.

“How do we get to him, Cas? We opened a door and it didn’t show us anything. He’s not there.”

“The door is there. If we can reach the lighthouse on this side, he’ll be there on the other, but I cannot control the wind. Row, Dean.”

“What do you think I’m doing, Cas? This motor is useless in this water, and I’m not a damn sailor! We’ll never reach it. The storm is too strong.”

“If you wish to see Sam in the next hundred years or so, we _must_ reach it. It may be our last chance. It was a new moon when Sam went in, so we need..”

Their voices faded. Sam fought the storm. Though he knew he lay trapped in sleep in the lantern room in the lighthouse, he sent himself out over the waves, skimming over them like a gull. He sent himself into the lighthouse’s light. He became it, the storm, the salt spray and the crying wind. He called Dean’s name.

_Sam?_

It—he—could hear him! He screamed and tore at the storm with bare bleeding hands, with the beacon. He pulled apart the waves and the thunderheads and behind them, he found the moon. It rose mighty over the ocean that sang to its pull, sailed in the parting clouds in the sky, pressed celestial lips to the lighthouse’s beam and spilled over the world in a glory of light, light, light.

* * *

Sam wakes huddled, thin, weak and mostly broken on the lighthouse floor, and the sound of the waves has changed, and the light that blinds him has changed. He stands, barely able to make his legs lift him, and he brushes his hands near the beacon, and he turns.

The moon. The boat. The dying storm, and an angel, and Sam’s brother.

The lighthouse beam is in front of them. The glorious, terrifyingly beautiful moon licks the waves silver behind them. Bathed in color and light, the boat bobs in rough shallows, washed toward the shore. Sam runs down the stairs and across the sand, weeping and laughing at the sound of his name called out. His name, which he had almost forgotten, spoken by voices he never could. 

He runs, into time passing and into the world, back into the arms of his life, and when it grabs him tight and pulls him into being, thumps his back roughly and hoarsely says his name again, he finds he wants it after all.


End file.
